The States That Flipped From Trump in 2020 — And How They Could Shape Up in 2024 #3: Michigan
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Part 6: Finale
Six states that Donald Trump won the electoral votes for in the 2016 presidential election flipped (or in the case of Nebraska, partially shifted) to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes went to Biden. The five states that went from red to blue for president are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In this series of posts, I will look at recent political history of these states and current partisan trends. With a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 looking increasingly likely, this series of posts will largely assume that that will be the case and make some sense of whether these states will stick with Biden or flip back to Trump. (Now that Nikki Haley is out of the race, a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 is all but assured pending lawsuits over Trump’s candidacy.)
Today’s post is the third post of the series and focuses on Michigan, The Great Lakes State.
Michigan and Recent Presidential Elections
Recent presidential election history in Michigan is far different than it is for the first two states of this series, Arizona and Georgia. Whereas those two had been routinely Republican prior to the 2020 election, Michigan had been safely Democratic for recent presidential candidates before the 2016 election.
Below are the presidential election results for Michigan from 1988 to 2020. The 1988 election was Republicans’ last capture of the state’s Electoral College votes prior to Trump winning them in 2016. Red and negative vote margins mean a Republican candidate won the state; blue and positive vote margins mean a Democrat won the state. (As before, positive and negative percentages are not value judgments on the candidates. They are just to demonstrate the direction that an election went.)
In several cases, Republican presidential candidates didn’t even come remotely close to winning the state: Three of their six losses from 1992 to 2012 were by 9.5 percentage points or more. The last time a Republican had a substantial victory in Michigan was in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 election win.
Donald Trump managed to break that streak in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, albeit in a nailbiter. Less than 11,000 votes separated the two candidates in Michigan, leading to a 0.22 percentage point victory for Trump. But in 2020, Joe Biden took the state from Trump with a 2.78 percentage point margin of victory — not a blowout by any means, but not the barnburner Michigan was in 2016.
Considering Michigan’s blue leaning in most recent presidential elections, the flip of the state back to Democrats wasn’t surprising. The three major election ratings organizations also predicted that to be the case in the final days of the 2020 campaigns. The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball gave Michigan a “Leans D” rating, one tier away from a toss-up. Inside Elections was a little more confident in their “Leans Democratic” rating, which by their methodology is two tiers away from a toss-up.
Where did Joe Biden make up ground in 2020 from Clinton’s performance in 2016? Which areas of Michigan confirmed what Cook, Sabato, and Inside Elections predicted? As before, we look at the county level. Michigan has 83 counties, so the table of data is too large to copy-paste here, but you can view the full data here.
I used Dave Leip’s Election Atlas to see the percentage of participating voters in each county that picked between Clinton/Trump in 2016 and Biden/Trump in 2020.¹ I did not find data on the total number of registered voters for each county at the times of the 2016 and 2020 elections. So, I used very recent stats in that regard as a proxy: The data on total number of voters by county was gathered from this source on March 11, 2024. (The link comes with a disclaimer that “Data is not real-time and updates once a day.”) But while there will have been some changes in voter populations over the past 4+ years, there won’t be enough of a difference to matter for this exercise. The order of counties from highest to lowest populations of voters will have also barely changed, if at all.
- Blue and positive margins of victory indicate the Democratic candidate won the county in that election year. Red and negative margins of victory indicate that Trump won that county.
- The rightmost column indicates the improvement in performance from 2016 to 2020 for either Biden or Trump. Red and negative margin of victory changes mean an improved performance by Trump. Blue and positive margin of victory changes mean an improved performance by Biden. But an improvement in margin of victory does not necessarily mean that candidate won that county.
Here are several snapshots of top 10s for the data.
Here are the most important top-level data points from the full table.
- Trump won 72 of the 83 counties of Michigan in 2020. However, three of the ones that he won in 2016 flipped to Biden in 2020: Kent (4th-highest voter population), Saginaw (11th-highest), and Leelanau (61st-highest).
- Biden improved upon Clinton’s performance in 55 counties, ranging from 0.2 percentage points (Manistee County, 60th-highest voter population) to 9.4 percentage points (Grand Traverse County, 21st-highest).
- Trump improved upon his 2016 performance in 28 counties, ranging from 0.1 percentage points (Genesee County, 5th-highest voter population) to 3.9 percentage points (Montcalm County, 30th-highest).
- In 11 of the top 13 (and 25 of the top 29) counties by highest voter population, Biden improved upon Clinton’s performance.
Once again, we see the dichotomy between the more populous and less populous counties. Geographically, it tends to look like Republican candidates dominate statewide because they often win lesser-populated and/or more rural counties, and not just in Michigan. More rural counties are numerous in many states. Biden only won 11 counties in Michigan in 2020, but nine of those were in the top 12 counties by voter population. It’s higher population and/or urban counties that tend to vote Democratic — those are the counties with major cities, and big cities tend to be blue.
That’s one of the reasons why you can’t simply look at what counties were won by which candidate, but how much each candidate won them by. The counties are also very uneven in their voter populations. Keweenaw has the smallest with 2,104 voters, while Wayne has 1,434,574 voters, on March 11, 2024. With Biden improving performances (sometimes significantly so) in most of the large counties, he was able to turn Clinton’s 11,000-vote loss in Michigan to Trump in 2016 into a 155,000-vote victory over Trump in 2020.
I’m not privy to the exact strategies that the Trump campaign used in 2016 compared to 2020. But at the very least, the Trump team and Republicans need to compare and contrast what went right in 2016 and what went wrong in 2020. Considering his razor-thin victory in Michigan in 2016, there’s little margin for error if he wants to reclaim the state’s Electoral College votes. That starts with these huge populations counties like Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, and Kent (the top four), which all saw improved performances by Biden. Even if he doesn’t win them, Trump needs to lessen Biden’s margin of victory in such places.
Could Other Elections in Michigan Suggest How 2024 Will Pan Out?
As stated in previous installments of the series, other elections that have happened in Michigan can provide some insight into what might happen in 2024, but such data must be taken with a grain of salt. Here is a summary of the main reasons for tempering predictions for president based on other races in the state.
- Every race has different underlying factors (e.g., the candidates themselves, strategies, spending, the issues) influencing how they play out.
- Elections from different kinds of election years have different levels of voter turnout (e.g., midterms have lower rates of voter turnout than presidential elections), meaning different sets of voters are influencing the results in different years. Many presidential election voters did not participate in the midterms.
- Elections might not cover the same geographical areas (e.g., governor’s elections are statewide, but state house seats are divided into districts).
Governor
While presidential elections in Michigan have been mostly dominated by Democrats in recent times, the governorship has actually been more of a back-and-forth affair between the two main parties. Since a two-term lifetime limit was imposed on the office through a 1992 ballot measure, every governor of the state has won their reelection bid. (Republican John Engler, who was exempt from the measure, was able to win three elections: 1990, 1994, and 1998.)
But so far, whenever a Michigan governor has hit a term limit, the opposing party has taken back the seat.
- After Engler retired, Democrat Jennifer Granholm (current Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy) won handily in 2002 and 2006.
- Republican Rick Snyder won his elections in 2010 and 2014 handily, too.
- Democrat Gretchen Whitmer then won the 2018 and 2022 elections comfortably, as well.
It’s been a long time since Michigan votes have had a truly close governor’s election to vote in. Yet both of the major parties have shown not only an ability to win the office, but to do so in blowouts. That hasn’t been the case recently for presidential elections in The Great Lakes State — those have been mostly dominated by Democrats. Governor’s races also happen in midterm elections, which see different types of voters and lower rates of turnout than in presidential elections.
Another pertinent data point to mention: The last three times a Democrat was elected governor, Michigan voted for a Democrat in the successive presidential election (2002–2004, 2006–2008, 2018–2020). Will that happen a fourth straight time in 2024, since Whitmer won in 2022?
U.S. Senate
Where the gap between Republican and Democratic candidates is most apparent is in U.S. Senate races. Democratic candidates have won nine consecutive elections for that office — six of those by 13.29 percentage points or more. The last time that a Republican won a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan was 1994, when Spencer Abraham did so. The last time before that was in 1972 (Robert P. Griffin).
Abraham ran for reelection in 2000 but was unsuccessful, losing out to incumbent Debbie Stabenow. The other U.S. Senate seat was occupied by Democrat Carl Levin from 1979 to 2015 (he did not run for reelection in 2014) and now is held by Gary Peters. Peters won again in 2020 but in the closest matchup for the office since the 2000 election, winning by only 1.69 percentage points.
But last year, Stabenow announced that she was retiring. That eliminates the incumbency advantage Democrats would have had for the seat in 2024. And since 2008, U.S. Senate races in Michigan have been trending in Republicans’ favor as Democrats’ margins of victory have decreased each successive election. With an open seat and improvements in performance by Republican U.S. Senate candidates in the state, a Republican could break the Democratic streak.
On the other hand, having both a U.S. Senate seat and a Biden/Trump rematch in the same election year — on the same ballot — complicates things further. Depending on who comes out with the Republican and Democratic nominations, the general election for U.S. Senate and the Biden/Trump contest could have a major impact on each other. Let’s take a look at those candidates.
- Republicans: Three former U.S. House Representatives — Justin Amash, Mike Rogers, and Peter Meijer — are currently the most well-known candidates vying for the GOP nomination. Rogers won Trump’s primary endorsement. Conversely, Meijer was one of the few House Republicans to vote for impeaching Trump and has already butted heads with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the campaign arm for U.S. Senate Republicans. Amash had also been a vocal critic of Trump, leading him to switch to the Libertarian Party and withdraw from the 2020 election, eventually being succeeded by Meijer.
- Democrats: The Democratic side of the race includes current U.S. House Rep. Elissa Slotkin, actor Hill Harper, and businessman Nasser Beydoun. Slotkin is the current favorite to win the seat, though Harper has kept himself in the news and could make some noise in the Democratic Primary. Beydoun currently doesn’t have nearly the same level of name recognition as Slotkin and Harper, but he may be able to harness anger some Michigan Democrats have toward Biden regarding his handling of the Israel-Hamas War.
Betting odds, as of now, would probably say that we get a general election between Mike Rogers and Elissa Slotkin. Would Rogers being endorsed by Trump turn off too many voters? Or would the fact that Trump and Rogers are going to be on the same ballot this year energize the Republican base for both candidates?
Let’s look back at 2020, the last time Michigan voted on both a U.S. Senate seat and the president. Democrats won both of those contests, but not by very wide margins. Biden took the state from Trump for president, but Republicans made the U.S. Senate race the closest that Michigan has had since the 2000 election, and have continually made it a closer contest since the 2008 election.
If you’re a campaign strategist, you can look at those results in two basic ways. If you theorize that Trump and Rogers being on the same ballot is a problem for both candidates, you can point to 2020 and say, “Look how Trump lost the state and the Republican U.S. Senate candidate also lost, largely because of dissatisfaction with Trump as then-incumbent.” But if you think that having Trump and Rogers on the same ballot is actually a boost for both, you can point to the same results and say, “But Trump didn’t lose by much (and won it previously), the U.S. Senate race was closer than it had been for 20 years, and now there is widespread dissatisfaction with Biden as the incumbent.”
Who would be right? That’s for campaign strategists and other political observers to decide. And that’s just one strategic consideration. Then you must consider how Slotkin would factor into the equation. Or what if Rogers and/or Slotkin happened to not make it out of their respective primaries?
State Legislature
In recent years, the Michigan State Legislature has diverged from the other offices in the state in that has been mostly under control of the Republican Party. The State Senate had a GOP majority from 1986 to 2022. The State House, like many state legislative chambers across the country, flipped to red following the 2010 midterm election. Even though the state went for Biden in 2020, the state legislature retained its Republican majority.
But since 2014, the gap between the number of Republicans and Democrats in the state house and state senate began to close. In 2022, both chambers flipped to the Democratic Party.
One must keep in mind about how state legislative elections are each only for specific geographical areas as opposed to one seat being elected statewide for president, governor, and U.S. Senate. And because Democrat and Republican voters are not going to be evenly spread out across the state, the division of Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature is not necessarily going to be reflective of the general population’s partisan leanings.
Then you must account for how Michigan’s state legislative elections happen in both midterm and presidential election years. Michigan state senate seats are also four-year terms and only elected in midterm. So, the voter turnout levels, and which voters show up, are not necessarily comparable to those voting for president. (Races further down the ballot also tend to see a drop-off in voters participating, so the total number of votes being cast for president is going to be higher than the total number of votes cast for state legislative seats even when they are being elected in the same year.)
The Partisan Affiliations of Michigan Voters
Michigan is not one of the 31 states that tracks the partisan affiliations of voters. So, to generally estimate the partisan divide of the state, we have to infer by other means. What do we know about how Michigan elections play out for the parties?
First, it’s interesting to juxtapose the trend in the state legislative partisan divide with the trends in U.S. Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential vote shares among the parties. Generally speaking, we’ve seen these patterns since 2010:
- The state legislature has been seeing Democratic gains even though it’s been mostly Republican majorities.
- The governorship has been won by a Republican in that timeframe, but Democrat Gretchen Whitmer has won her two elections in 2018 and 2022 easily.
- The U.S. Senate has been dominated by Democrats, but they’ve been winning by smaller vote margins in each successive election.
- The presidential race in Michigan has been mostly won by Democrats, but Republican Donald Trump has won the state and did not lose the state by that wide a margin in 2022 (2.78 percentage points).
Then you must also account for the rural/urban divide that has been discussed earlier in this article and in my article on Georgia. Rural, less populated counties are usually Republican. Urban, more populated counties are usually Democratic. Big cities in Michigan include the following:
- Ann Arbor (Washtenaw County, 6th-highest voter population)
- Dearborn (Wayne County, highest voter population)
- Detroit (Wayne County)
- East Lansing (Ingham County, 8th-highest voter population)
- Flint (Genesee County, 5th-highest voter population)
- Grand Rapids (Kent County, 4th-highest voter population)
- Kalamazoo (Kalamazoo county, 9th-highest voter population)
Wayne County is far-and-away the highest voter population, powered largely by Dearborn and Detroit. Ingham, Wayne, and Washtenaw Counties heavily voted for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Trump did manage to win Kent County in 2016 but then lost it in 2020.
And naturally, state legislative districts are concentrated in areas with high populations (i.e., big cities). Such districts are usually going to go mostly to Democrats , and that is the case with Michigan. In the state senate — which has 38 total seats — that includes most of Districts 1 through 15. In the state house — which has 110 total seats — that includes most of Districts 1 through 30 and 69 through 84. (You can use Ballotpedia’s lists of incumbent state representatives and senators and compare it to the maps of Michigan on Statistical Atlas.)
Based on recent election results and how concentrated the population of Michigan is in cities, it seems that — if the state were to track the partisan affiliation of voters — that there would be a higher number of Democrats than Republicans statewide. But it’s hard to know for sure and this doesn’t account for voters that could be registered as independents.
2024 in Michigan: Who has the Advantage?
Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, as of March 13, 2024, rank Michigan’s presidential race as “Tilt Democratic” and “Leans Democratic,” respectively. Those are one tier away from “toss-up” for both ratings organizations. The Cook Political Report doesn’t even go that far, keeping their rating at “toss-up” for now.
Given those ratings and what we know about Michigan election history over the past 20+ years, the advantage in the state seems to be on Biden’s side, slight as it may be. It has become much more unpredictable in The Great Lakes State in the last couple go-arounds for the Oval Office.
Anger within the Democratic electorate’s ranks over Biden’s handling of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War adds to the uncertainty. A sizable number of primary voters chose to be “uncommitted” in Michigan’s primary a couple weeks ago. Granted, Biden was never going to lose the primary, which perhaps made it easier for some voters to voice their disapproval. And the primaries usually see the most hardcore voters, who don’t necessarily reflect the wider population that participates more in the general election.
Still, if enough of the Democratic base that would usually be relied upon protests Biden in the general election, that can be a problem for his reelection chances. They certainly won’t vote for Trump, and their opposition of Trump may be enough to ultimately drive the “uncommitted” voters to Biden in November. But some of them could choose to stay home completely or even vote for a third-party/non-party candidate. If Trump improves upon his performance from 2020, that may be enough for the Republican Party to take back Michigan’s Electoral College votes.
At this time, Democrats appear to have a slight advantage in Michigan in their quest to elect Biden to a second term. But there is certainly little room for error.
- Note that Dave Leip’s Election Atlas has Republican as blue and Democrats as red, instead of the usual conception of Republicans as red and Democrats as blue. The reasons for this are described here.
